more random recs! (Reply)

Man, I have totally lost my System from previous years. These are still from all over the place! I haven't even finished reading in some of these categories! Please send help, or possibly a spreadsheet.

The True Death of Frank Gardiner, an excellent story that builds on the Lovecraft mythos with intriguing OCs and a perfect, perfect setting -- San Francisco, April 18th, 1906.

Dorothy Sayers - Lord Peter Wimsey series

All Our Scattered Leaves which, oh my god. It's a beautiful epistolary piece featuring basically everyone in this circle around Peter, affected by his return and his shell-shock. And there's just perfect Duchess of Denver and Miss Climpson voices, which must be really hard styles to match. <3s

Fairy Tales - The Ugly Duckling

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Duckling. Oh man, this is really just great. It's takes the moral of the Ugly Duckling story -- that's the duckling is beautiful to his own kind -- and says, what the fuck? No really, what the fuck? It's really really nicely done, sharp-edged and beautiful, full of people with good intentions who do harm. And the main character's just brilliantly written. (Also for the Dark Agenda challenge.)

Jonathon Stroud - The Bartimaeus Trilogy

As Far As Adventures Go, It Was Pretty Okay. The mystery author here has done a perfect Bartimaeus voice, completely with appropriate footnotes. This is sort of the first day of Bartimaeus and Ptolemy's magician/demon relationship, and they're building their banter and their understanding of each other, and it's totes fun :)

Ursula K Le Guin - Earthsea

Other Dances, all about Tenar and Tehanu and women choosing their own fates in the books.

Unbinding, a short but interesting piece about the similarities between Tenar and Tehanu.

And Chasing Shadows, in which Ged and Vetch are friends, and devoted to each other.

Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveler

Five stories the Reader never began. So, this was recced by about a million people a week ago, but I didn't read it: it was in a tab almost all the way to the left, where closing tabs would never deposit me, and anyway the beginning of the story was good enough that I kept waiting until I felt up for it. (I note that this is not one of the possibilities mentioned in the story, but there you go.) I've never read If on a winter's night a traveler, but thingswithwings read out the first page when I said so in response to livrelibre's request, so all I can say is that the beginning of this sounds a lot like the first paragraphs of that.

Regardless, this is brilliantly meta. It's a story about yuletide and about fandom and the history of fandom, and it's all just completely perfect: the wayback machine! #yuletide! AWESOME.

Lois McMaster Bujold - Chalionverse

Life, stripped of all luxuries. AWESOME. It made me go "oh!" a lot, because this is Caz and his men during the siege of Gotorget, and it's beautiful and grim and a perfect backstory. It make dy Jironal's betrayal count more, mean something worse, than it did in the book.

Terry Pratchett - Discworld

Like Clockwork. This is a really neat little day-in-the-life of Vetinari, from his POV. It says interesting things about Vetinari's intentional isolation, his relationship with Drumknott, and his relationship with the city and with knowledge. Very neat.

A Place Called Home. Also Drumknott focused, this is the story of Drumknott visiting his family, and of Drumknott making a bigger family to include Vetinari. Vetinari is so good at reading Drumknott here, and in doing something about what he sees, that it conveys a lot of respect in a tiny little space.